Choose Your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary by Douglas Hurd

Author:Douglas Hurd [Hurd, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

That was the heart of the matter. Grey was not easy in talking in public about the balance of power, which meant different things to different people. But in private he wrote plainly about the Germans: ‘we know that the phrase “balance of power” stinks in their nostrils. They want the hegemony of Europe, and to neutralise the only thing that has prevented them from getting it viz England’s naval strength. They want an understanding which would have that effect.’24 The hard truth in the background was obvious. A Liberal Government could never bring in conscription in peacetime. This meant that Britain would continue to have a small Army compared to the main European powers. As a result she would have to maintain her naval superiority, and reluctantly outbuild any country which challenged it.

So the antagonism flowed on, fed by a thousand tributaries of rumour and gossip. In the long years before opinion polls politicians relied on casual anecdote to gauge opinion. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the station master, as later the taxi driver, could play a chance but important part in assessing opinion and shaping policy. Grey relayed to his Ambassador in Berlin the story of an English lady who had been told by an Austrian officer of the great hostility towards England he had found everywhere in Germany.25 In another letter the same year he referred to reports ‘that a great number of German officers spend their holidays in this country at various points along the east and south coasts from the Humber to Portsmouth: places where they can be for no reason except that of making strategical notes as to our coasts. Friends of mine are constantly meeting in such places unexpected German officers who are known to be active, energetic and in good repute in Germany, and by no means discarded or retired.’26 Out of such excitements emerged a crowd of best-selling novels, following the lead of The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers in 1903. An even more exciting outcome in real life was the creation of MI5 and the Official Secrets Act of 1911.

In 1907 Grey achieved the entente with Russia which he had advocated two years earlier. The agreement followed the Anglo-French model of 1904: outstanding issues were settled without any formal alliance or undertakings for the future. In this way the ambiguities beloved by Britain were preserved, but a pattern of co-operation established which might (or might not) develop into something more formidable. The agreement, when compared for example with Salisbury’s agreements with Germany, showed some signs of accepting that the world had moved into a new and less imperial century. There were no annexations, but instead spheres of influence. Russia was to keep out of Tibet and Afghanistan, both of which were to be buffer states. Persia, also in theory independent, was to be divided in three, a Russian, British and a neutral sphere of influence. Grey had trouble with the Conservative Opposition, led in the Lords by

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